Hostinger Review (May 2024): Is It Still the Best Cheap Web Hosting Provider?

Hostinger Review: Web hosting is extremely important in today’s digital environment. A trustworthy and secure web hosting provider is required to run a successful website. Hostinger is one of the most popular hosting solutions.

I’ve been using Hostinger for my websites since 2019. And today, I’m back with the Hostinger India Review for the fourth year running! For this evaluation, I tested three of my websites on Hostinger’s various plans and servers.

I’ve run numerous speed tests, load tests, and uptime tests over the past few months to evaluate their performance!

In this hosting review, I will walk you through the most notable features of Hostinger. We will also discuss its security features, user interface, pricing plans, significant benefits and drawbacks, as well as potential alternatives.

I have a fantastic discount coupon code and a training program for those of you wanting to purchase Hostinger hosting. So, read until the end to find out! Let’s dive right in.

Hostinger Review

About Hostinger

Hostinger is a web hosting firm founded in 2004 in Kaunas, Lithuania. They used to call it Hosting Media, but after reaching 1 million users, they changed the name to Hostinger in 2011.

Since then, it has had constant growth. They have had a particularly rewarding few years, beginning in 2019. Hostinger currently has over 29 million users worldwide, with 15k new websites being installed every day!

Hostinger India is the Indian counterpart of Hostinger, which is accessible via Hostinger.in. The following is a summary of the features available with its hosting options!

Hostinger Features Overview

Speeds (India)	Shared Hosting (Singapore) – 2.16 sec Shared Hosting (US) – 4.51 sec Shared Hosting (India) – 1.34 sec
Uptime (Jan 2023 – Jan 2024)	Shared Hosting (Singapore): 99.95% Shared Hosting (US): 99.97% Shared Hosting (India): 99.95%
Features	hPanel, Free SSL, 1-click WordPress Installer, free domain for 1 year, Website Staging, Hostinger Website Builder, Email Hosting, Object cache (Business plans & above)
Data Centers	UK, USA, Singapore, India, Netherlands, Indonesia, and Lithuania.
Servers	Litespeed Servers
Backup and Restoration	Free weekly backups on all plans Daily backups on higher plans Selective restore feature available
Website Migration	Unlimited free migrations on all plans
Security	Free Let’s Encrypt SSL, 2FA, PatchStack Security, Cloudflare DNS Firewall, Bitninja Security, Malware Scanner, Automatic Updates
Support	Email Form, Live Chat, Knowledgebase, Video Tutorials
Payment Options	Visa, MasterCard, American Express, Discover, PayPal, Cryptocurrency, PayTM, Google Pay, UPI Payments in India
Hosting Plans	Shared Hosting, WordPress Hosting, Cloud Hosting, cPanel Hosting, VPS Hosting, Minecraft Hosting, CyberPanel VPS Hosting
Refund Policy	30-days money-back guarantee
Pricing	Starting from ₹69/mo

Hostinger Video Review

If you enjoy watching videos, check out my video review of Hostinger here.

Hostinger User Interface

Hostinger’s UI appears to be sleek, simple, and beginner-friendly. Unlike the typical cPanel supplied by most hosting providers, Hostinger distinguishes themselves with hPanel.

hPanel is Hostinger’s bespoke user interface, including a modern look and easily accessible features.

It includes all of the essential functions, such as DNS Zone Editor, Domains, Email accounts, File Manager, Backups, Website Migrations, App Installer, and the WordPress Dashboard! It also includes a useful search box, allowing you to easily put in any function you want to access.

Hostinger has made significant modifications to its hPanel in recent years. So migrating from cPanel to hPanel would be no trouble!

If you need to edit PHP files on your hosting, cPanel is a better option. hPanel can edit PHP files, however I prefer cPanel for PHP.

So, if you want a cPanel-based hosting service, you can choose FastComet, ChemiCoud, or A2 Hosting.

Testing Parameters:

For this study, I used Hostinger’s Shared Business Web Hosting plan across three servers. The following are the demo websites I utilized for testing.

• US Servers Website
• Indian Servers Website
• Singapore Servers Website

On all of these websites, I used the following parameters:.

• OceanWP Theme
• Gym template (Elementor Based)
• LiteSpeed Cache plugin (default settings)

Now let’s take a short look at the various exams.

Hostinger’s Server Response Time

Server Response Time (SRT) is the time between a user making a request and the server responding to it. I examined the SRT of all of my Hostinger websites hosted on servers in the United States, Singapore, and India.

Let’s look at the outcomes.

Indian Servers

I discovered that Indian servers responded faster in Asian locales such as Singapore, Mumbai, and Japan. For example, the SRT was the lowest in Mumbai (2 ms) and Singapore (55 ms).

It continued to rise as we traveled to more distant locations, such as Germany, Sydney, London, and the United States.

US Servers

On US servers, response times were longer for Asian countries but much faster for locations such as the United States (22 ms), Canada (36 ms), London (91 ms), and so on.

Singapore Servers

When I checked the server response time for Singapore-based servers, I got the following findings.

Hostinger Speeds

Page loading speed is the time it takes for a webpage to fully load on your screen. According to Portent research conducted in 2019, website conversion rates decrease by an average of 4.42% for each additional second of load time (between seconds 0 and 5).

Let’s see how our websites performed in the speed tests.

Hostinger Uptime

Website uptime refers to the amount of time your website is available to users. Uptime is an important factor for every organization because a downtime may sometimes result in the loss of clients!

The ideal uptime should exceed 99.9%. If a website is operational 99.9% of the time, the total downtime per month is 43 minutes and 49 seconds.

Since 2021, I’ve been using the Better Uptime application to monitor the availability of my Hostinger websites. It monitors my websites’ uptime every 30 seconds. Let’s see how they performed.

Hostinger Uptime Status Report (Last 12 months)

Singapore Servers

This is the uptime report for Hostinger Shared Business Hosting (Singapore Servers) over the last 365 days.

January 2024	100%
December 2023	99.99%
November 2023	100%
October 2023	99.95%
September 2023	99.94%
August 2023	99.97%
July 2023	99.93%
June 2023	99.95%
May 2023	99.98%
April 2023	99.99%
March 2023	100%
February 2023	100%
January 2023	100%

My website has been up 99.95% of the time over the previous 365 days. In contrast, I have seen a 99.98% uptime over the last 30 days. The total downtime during the last 365 days has been 3 hours and 36 minutes.

US Servers

This is the uptime report for Hostinger Shared Business Hosting (US Servers) over the last 365 days.

January 2024	99.69%
December 2023	99.98%
November 2023	99.99%
October 2023	99.99%
September 2023	99.99%
August 2023	99.89%
July 2023	100%
June 2023	99.96%
May 2023	99.99%
April 2023	99.95%
March 2023	99.98%
February 2023	100%
January 2023	99.99%

My website has been up 99.95% of the time over the previous 365 days. In contrast, I have noticed an unbeatable 100% uptime during the last 30 days. The total downtime during the last 365 days has been 4 hours and 4 minutes.

Indian Servers

This is the uptime data for Hostinger Shared Business Hosting (Indian Servers) over the last 365 days.

January 2024	99.85%
December 2023	99.92%
November 2023	99.99%
October 2023	99.94%
September 2023	99.97%
August 2023	99.72%
July 2023	99.94%
June 2023	99.99%
May 2023	100%
April 2023	99.99%
March 2023	100%
February 2023	100%
January 2023	99.97%

In the last 365 days, my website has been up 99.94% of the time. In contrast, I have experienced a consistent 100% uptime over the last 30 days. The total downtime during the last 365 days has been 4 hours and 47 minutes.

It should be noted that I have active Hostinger Business Shared Hosting plans. This page will be updated every month to reflect the uptime.

Overall, I noticed that the US and Singapore servers had better uptime than the Indian ones. ChemiCloud, StableHost, or Rocket.net can all help you increase your uptime performance.

Hostinger Load Test

Load testing is the practice of examining software’s performance and efficiency by subjecting it to real-world conditions. For this test, I sent 100 virtual users to each of my websites to check how well they manage high traffic. Let’s look at the outcomes.

Indian Servers

Regarding the Indian servers, virtual users made a total of 17.5k queries. Peak requests reached 97 per second, with a P95 response time of under 19 milliseconds.

This means that 95% of the requests took approximately 19ms to complete.

In my experience, the response time rose once at the start and then stabilized. Surprisingly, no HTTP errors occurred during the whole test session. Overall, the Indian servers performed fairly well.

US Servers

The US servers performed admirably during the load test. I sent 100 virtual users to my website, and they generated a total of 17.1k queries. Peak requests reached 99.33 requests per second, with a P95 response time of 79 milliseconds.

The fact that no HTTP requests failed is quite impressive. However, the response time fluctuated throughout. Overall, the US servers demonstrated excellent load-handling capacity!

Singapore Servers

When I sent 100 virtual users to my website located in Singapore, they produced a total of 17.5k queries. The peak requests reached 98.67 req/sec, with a P95 response time of only 17 ms.

Interestingly, none of the queries failed, indicating that it handled the load effectively. Overall, the Singapore servers functioned well, with no significant spikes in response times.

Hostinger Cache

Built-in cache manager

Hostinger includes built-in cache management that can be configured from the user dashboard. It increases the speed of your website, delivering a better experience for your visitors!

Hostinger has recently included an object cache to its Business plan and above. This results in dramatic improvements in webpage speed. If you have a dynamic website or an eCommerce store, object cache will be useful to you.

Cache Plugin

Hostinger employs LiteSpeed servers, which also have the LiteSpeed Cache plugin. It is a free plugin that might help you increase your website’s speed.

Hostinger Data Centers

Hostinger’s data centers are located in seven countries, including the United Kingdom, the United States, Singapore, India, the Netherlands, Indonesia, and Lithuania.

In May 2024, they announced the opening of a new Hostinger Data Centre in Mumbai, India. That’s fantastic news if you’re targeting an Indian audience. It will dramatically increase the speed of your website.

Hostinger Domains

Aside from web hosting, a suitable domain name is required to run your blog or online business. Let’s have a look at Hostinger’s domain features.

Free Domains

Hostinger offers new hosting customers a free.com domain for the first year. However, it is only accessible for Premium and Business Shared Hosting plans. The Starter plan doesn’t include a free domain.

All WordPress hosting plans, except the Single WordPress plan, provide a free domain. ChemiCloud hosting offers a lifetime free domain.

New Domain Pricing

Hostinger also offers fresh domain registrations at reasonable prices. For example, these are the new, cheaper prices for some popular domain extensions:

Extension	Pricing/year
.com	₹499
.in	₹199
.org	₹659
.tech	₹169
.xyz	₹169

These are the costs that apply for the first year if you purchase these domain names for two or more years. After the first year, regular charges will be applied to your domain.

Preview URL

A Preview URL (also known as a Temporary Domain Name) is a tool in Hostinger that allows you to browse your website without attaching your domain name. It is useful to test your website if you have not yet set your nameservers to your web host.

However, the Preview URL is only available for a maximum of 120 hours. It only applies to the main domain you’ve registered. However, using a simple method, you may obtain preview URLs for your subdomains and add-on domains as well.

Hostinger Security

Hostinger offers its consumers a number of security options. Let us examine them in depth.

SSL Certificate

An SSL certificate is required for your website’s security. With Hostinger’s hosting package, you receive an unlimited number of free SSL certificates for your websites.

As a result, every website you add to your Hostinger account can be secured with a free SSL certificate!

Aside from that, you can get a free SSL certificate from Cloudflare. My Hostinger Training Program discusses how to achieve this! Continue reading to learn more about it.

PatchStack Security

Hostinger has recently partnered with Patchstack, a strong WordPress security plugin.

This plugin will notify WordPress users if vulnerabilities arise in any of their plugins. This is a great security tool for protecting your website.

2FA

2FA (Two Factor Authentication) is a way of authenticating a person’s identification by requiring an additional factor, such as an OTP code, biometric recognition, hardware key, and so on, during login.

2FA provides an additional degree of security by preventing unwanted individuals from accessing your online accounts.

Hostinger offers email and software-based 2FA to protect your hosting account. To secure your accounts, you can utilize authentication programs such as Authy, LastPass, and Google Authenticator.

Cloudflare DNS Firewall

All Hostinger plans support Cloudflare DNS. You can activate it from the Hostinger dashboard.

Cloudflare DNS effectively defends your website against all forms of harmful traffic including DDoS attacks.

Bitninja Security

Hostinger uses Bitninja security by default on all of its servers. It is a sophisticated security feature that detects and blocks suspect logins until they are verified.

Bitninja also defends against viruses, DDoS attacks, and brute force attacks.

Malware Scanner

Hostinger has unveiled its Malware Scanner tool, which can be accessed through the dashboard’s Security features.

It automatically checks all files and data uploaded by users, removing corrupted and harmful files. As a result, it is a very important security tool for any website owner.

Automatic updates

Hostinger recently added the Automatic Updates option. It automatically updates your website with the most recent versions of WordPress core, themes, and plugins.

This ensures that your website is not vulnerable to WordPress themes and plugins. Overall, Hostinger’s security features are fairly solid.

Hostinger Backups and Restoration

Hostinger’s backup and restoration services have undergone significant enhancements in recent years. Hostinger offers free weekly backups with all of its hosting options.

Apart from that, their Business Shared Hosting and above plans include free daily backups. You can back up your website’s files, databases, or your entire hosting account.

The daily backups are stored for seven days. Weekly backups, on the other hand, can be stored for up to 7 weeks. So, if you ever need to restore your backups, you can do so from the last 7 days or weekly backups from the previous 7 weeks.

Your data is backed up on a different server to maintain its security. It also lets you create manual backups and offers one-click backups and recoveries.

If you need free daily backups on other hosting plans, you must pay an additional fee to use this option.

Hostinger has an intriguing option that allows you to choose restore your website files. You may choose which files you want to restore, which is a really convenient choice.

Hostinger Customer Support

Hostinger provides customer service via email, live chat, and a knowledge base. Regarding their live chat service, I received responses to my questions swiftly. The live chat was launched quickly, although it took a little longer to answer the questions.

I appreciated their wide knowledge collection of articles. You can get answers to many of your questions in their articles, which is ideal for novices. They also provide free tutorials on WordPress, website development, VPS hosting, and other topics to assist beginners.

Overall, the quality of their help has really improved over the last year. However, I believe they can enhance their support response times and frequencies.

Hosting Plans and Pricing

Hostinger offers three Shared Web Hosting options. Let’s take a short look at their key characteristics.

Single Hosting Plan	Premium Hosting Plan	Business Hosting Plan
Monthly Pricing (48 months)	₹69	₹149 / $2.99	₹269 / $3.99
No. of Websites	1	100	100
Monthly Traffic	10k visitors	25k visitors	100k visitors
SSD Storage	50 GB	100 GB	200 GB
Free Domain	No	Yes	Yes
Email	1	Up to 100	Up to 100
Inode Count	200k	400k	600k
Bandwidth	100 GB	Unlimited	Unlimited
Daily Backups	No	No	Yes

The highest discounts are offered if you buy these plans for four years. Smaller time lengths result in lower discounts. Isn’t this a good tactic by Hostinger for long-term user acquisition?

Other hosting plans include WordPress hosting, Cloud hosting, VPS hosting, and so on.

Hostinger Payment Methods

Planning to purchase a Hostinger hosting plan? It accepts a range of payment ways.

These include net banking, PayPal, international credit and debit cards, cryptocurrencies, and hostinger balance. Aside from that, it enables UPI payments, Paytm, and Google Pay for Indian users.

The UPI Payments feature is very handy for Indian users who do not have international debit or credit cards.

Hostinger’s Refund Policy

Hostinger provides a 30-day money-back guarantee on all of its plans. So you can buy a hosting package, try it for a month, and then get a full refund if you aren’t satisfied!

However, their refund policy includes a few limits and conditions. I discussed them in layman’s terms in my Hostinger training program.

If you want a longer return policy, consider A2 Hosting, which charges on a pro-rata basis!

Which is the best Hostinger plan and server?

Now that we’ve covered all of Hostinger’s key features, it’s time to choose the ideal plan and server. First, let’s talk about the plan you should avoid at all costs.

My advise is to avoid the Single Web Hosting package. It has less RAM, which is insufficient even for running basic webpages and blogs.

In rare cases, if you have a simple website with 5-10 static HTML pages, a single shared hosting plan may be a good choice. It is only appropriate for HTML or PHP webpages.

However, if you need to use WordPress, the Business Web Hosting package is the best option.

This plan’s main feature is the inclusion of an object cache, which ensures fast speeds. It also includes extensive backups, staging functionality, and a variety of WordPress AI tools.

This package has enough features to ensure a seamless and hassle-free experience. Along with increased RAM, you will receive a free domain for one year.

When it comes to the finest servers, I noticed that their servers in the United States and Singapore were significantly faster than those in India. You can choose either of these based on your target audience.

Hostinger Training Program

If you intend to purchase a hosting plan from Hostinger, I am confident that my training program will be of tremendous use to you. This training program is for individuals who purchased plans from Hostinger using my links.

In this application, I’ve included detailed tutorials on how to utilize Hostinger, including

• How to purchase hosting from Hostinger
• Setting up your hosting
• Connecting hosting to your domain
• Installing WordPress
• Taking and restoring backups
• Contacting customer support
• Enabling cache plugins

Hostinger Migrations

Similar to Rocket.net, Hostinger offers unlimited free website migrations with its hosting services.

To request a website migration, you must select your website control panel (WordPress, cPanel, or WHM) and include your:

• Domain name
• Admin login page URL
• Username and password
• Previous web hosting services

After you submit your migration request, someone from their team will manually transfer your website from your previous hosting provider to Hostinger at no cost! It could take between 2 and 4 days to finish the process.

Hostinger Staging

If you want to test new themes, plugins, or design upgrades on your website, Hostinger’s Staging capability may be useful. The Staging function allows you to build a replica of your live website and test changes to it.

The Staging option can be accessed on the Dashboard tab. All you need to do is set up a subdomain and publish your staging environment to it.

Then you can make changes to the website and test them. If you are satisfied with the modifications, simply publish the test version to the live website by clicking the ‘Publish’ option in the staging site list.

In my opinion, this is an excellent tool for developers and experts. It allows you to update your website with the most recent improvements without experiencing any downtime!

Additional Hostinger Features

Hostinger Inode Count

Inode Count is the total number of files on your website, including files, folders, emails, and anything else saved on the servers.

Hostinger provides a generous inode count even for its shared hosting services.

• Single Web Hosting – 200k
• Premium Web Hosting: 400k
• Business Web Hosting: 600k

Account Sharing

If you want to share your hosting account with your team, Hostinger’s Account Sharing function makes that feasible.

The unique aspect of this capability is that you may choose to share access with your developers and team members. Rather than giving them full access to your account, you can give them access to select websites, services, or hosting plans.

Email Hosting

Your Hostinger plan allows you to establish up to 100 email accounts, each with a storage limit of 1 GB. (1 email address for a single web hosting account)

However, the email service has several limits. You can only have 15k messages in each email account and send up to 500 per day. Overall, the email service performs well.

Content Delivery Networks (CDN)

Hostinger recently began delivering free CDN with their Business shared hosting plan and above. It caches your website data on several servers across the world and claims to deliver 40% quicker load times.

However, my experience with their CDN has been quite different. The last time I used Hostinger’s free CDN, the performance was below average. I recommend using Cloudflare’s free CDN or BunnyCDN instead. I use it on my own website as well.

Hostinger Pro Panel

Hostinger Pro Panel is an expansion of Hostinger’s hPanel that simplifies the management of many websites.

The Pro panel will be tremendously handy for freelancers, agencies, and anyone who manages numerous websites. It provides a consolidated dashboard from which to manage your clients’ websites and hosting services.

The Hostinger Pro panel offers quick website performance monitoring, secure access management capabilities, and a simple method to join the Hostinger Partner Program.

Check out this tutorial on how to set up Hostinger Pro Panel and start earning money with it.

Hostinger Website Builder

A website builder is very useful for individuals who want to create a quick website without using WordPress or other CMS platforms.

Hostinger provides its in-house Hostinger Website Builder (formerly known as Zyro) with all of its hosting services. It allows you to easily construct everything from blogs to business websites, portfolios, and online storefronts.

It includes over 140 appealing and professional themes for building your website. You’ll also find an AI website builder that can create your full website in under a minute. To design the ideal website, you can experiment with various layouts, styles, fonts, color palettes, and so on.

You’ll also find some sophisticated AI tools, such as AI Writer, AI Logo Maker, and AI Heatmaps, to help you save time when designing. The best part is that it is included for free with all Hostinger hosting options. You can also purchase it separately for ₹149.00/month.

Overall, Hostinger Website Builder is a realistic alternative for anyone wishing to quickly create quality websites at a reasonable cost. If you want to learn more, check out my Hostinger Website Builder review.

Hostinger Pros & Cons

Who Should Buy Hostinger?

This is the fifth year in a row that I have reviewed Hostinger. I still believe it’s a good hosting company for newbies on a budget.

They have made significant improvements in terms of interface, backup choices, speed, and usability. Though they can improve their customer support times, CDN, and the performance of Indian servers, I was pleased with Hostinger’s overall performance.

So, if you have a US-based audience, choose a Hostinger plan with US servers. They provide great speed and performance. Hostinger’s Shared hosting plans on US servers work similarly to Cloud hosting plans!

However, if you have an Indian audience, I cannot suggest their Indian servers. This is because the uptime and speeds I witnessed were fairly typical. You can instead choose their Singapore servers, which provide fast speeds and performance.

Overall, Hostinger is the best option for beginners looking for dependable, economical, and user-friendly shared hosting in 2024. I’ve hosted dozens of micro-niche blogs and websites on Hostinger and have had no difficulties with it!

Why Should You Trust Me?

I’ve been working full-time in the digital business since 2015. Throughout the years, I have tried and evaluated all of the prominent web hosting providers on both my personal and customer websites. For the past three years, I’ve been continuously analyzing hosting providers such as Cloudways, ChemiCloud, and FastComet.

In terms of Hostinger, I first purchased hosting from them in 2019–2024 for my micro niche blog. Since then, I’ve purchased various Hostinger plans, including the Cloud Startup plan. I even have ongoing memberships to several Hostinger plans, which I test each year.

Having used and tested dozens of hosting services over the past few years has given me the experience and skills to analyze their features and recommend the best hosting for your needs.

Conclusion

Hostinger is an amazing budget-friendly web hosting service. It has a user-friendly interface, fast speeds, extensive backup and security features, and Indian payment choices.

All of these qualities make it a dependable web host. I like how they’ve made significant adjustments and added many new features in the past year. They have launched agency tools, object cache, AI website builder, and CDN, as well as improved security and usability.

All of these makes Hostinger one of the top value-for-money web providers available in 2024. Their support speeds, CDN, and Indian data centers all have room for improvement. But I enjoy their rate of growth.

Hostinger is the best alternative for both new and experienced customers seeking a modern, convenient, and feature-rich hosting service. It provides all of the latest features at an inexpensive price!

If you plan to purchase a low-cost hosting service for your website, you can save an additional 7% by using my link and coupon code “DISCOUNT7”.

Purchasing using my link also grants you free access to my Hostinger Training Program, a great tutorial for novices to get started with Hostinger.

Anyway, I hope you found this hosting review useful. Which host are you currently using? Do you believe Hostinger is a decent option for you? Please let me know in the comments below.

This is Krishna, signing off! I’ll be back with more fascinating content shortly. Until then, stay at home and continue to learn!

FAQ